Recently, the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS) published the article The Ecosystems of Simple and Complex Societies: Social and Geographical Dynamics. The authors are researchers from the Research Center for Social Complexity (CICS, as its Spanish acronym), Ricardo Guzmán Price (PhD in economics) and Carlos Rodríguez-Sickert (PhD in economics), together with the student of the Doctorate in Social Complexity Sciences, Sammy Drobny. The article reports a spatial agent-based model about the appearance and proliferation of complex pre-modern societies (socially stratified) in a world inhabited initially by simple (egalitarian) societies. JASSS is the most important journal in the area of ​​computer simulations of social systems and it is among the best ones of interdisciplinary social sciences.

Guzmán, Rodríguez-Sickert and Drobny mathematically formalize several theories proposed by sociologists, anthropologists and historians, and integrate them into a simulation model. This model is able to account for the transition between different stages of sociocultural evolution in its intrasocial, intersocial and geographic dimensions.

The Paper

The Ecosystems of Simple and Complex Societies: Social and Geographical Dynamics
Ricardo Andrés Guzmán, Sammy Drobny and Carlos Rodríguez-Sickert
Research Center for Social Complexity, Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile
Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation
DOI: 10.18564 / jasss.3799
Read the full article here

About the Researcher

Ricardo Guzmán Price is a PhD. in Economics from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC). In addition, he holds a master’s degree in financial economics and a bachelor’s degree in computer science. He is co-founder of the Research Center for Social Complexity (CICS, as its Spanish acronym) of the Faculty of Government, Universidad del Desarrollo, in Santiago, Chile. He is an extramural professor at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UCSB, where he collaborates with the renowned scientist Leda Cosmides. Guzman’s research on cooperation and human conflict unites the behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology and mathematical sociology areas.